Years ago, Estrela do Mar was my hands-down favorite Portuguese restaurant on so many counts that the runners up might as well have been street corner pushcarts. The mere thought of their camarão alhinho -- shrimp with garlic -- made me purr. The place was friendly to the point of rudeness, if you know what I mean. (Waiter Mario would all but roll his eyes at dumb menu questions, but would also bring extra olives unasked.) The traditional dishes usually set my standards for elsewhere. The restaurant, with massive portions and ridiculously cheap prices, was so informal that regulars might go over and pluck a bottle of vinho verde from the cold case as if it was a can of Coke. There was even traditional music on Friday nights. And then, sad to say, the place went out of business -- shuttered up for maybe six months around early 2000. Sigh.

Dry your tears. Better yet, grin over a bowl of those tiny explosions of olive flavor, azeitonas, which were always a complimentary feature of the place. Estrela do Mar has been resurrected, under new ownership that understands what made Frank Clemente's original place so wonderful. Under George Rodrigues, whose father opened what was only the second Portuguese restaurant in New England back in the '70s, changes appear to have been for the better. He cooks on the busy weekends and supervises during the week while his wife, Nelci, serves as hostess.

Nothing that wasn't broken was fixed. Prices are still quite low, with seafood
dishes $12 to $14, except for the paelha and mariscada medleys at $20, and the market-price lobster. Nearly half of the more than two-dozen wines, all Portuguese, are less than $15, and there are some pricier bargains. (Rodrigues, touring the tables, said he'd rather see diners enjoying the wine rather than having a fancy list that nobody orders from.) Speaking of fancy, the once-plain dining room now has delicate peach-colored walls and swagged curtains. It's larger, pushed out 18 feet, so the place can accommodate 124 diners and there's plenty of parking in the lot across the street.

Most of the items on the old menu are still here -- including the camarão alhinho that I'd been looking forward to with such unseemly salivation. These days, the appetizer of a dozen and a half shrimp isn't as lemony as it was before -- a do-it-yourself lemon wedge is provided -- but the tangy, reddish sauce is still chunky with garlic, and I sopped up some with a piece of bread before even trying the crustaceans.

Fortunately, I started off with my only disappointment of the meal, so the appetizer could quickly compensate. For soup I wanted to try something different than the usual and presumably fine caldo verde ($2.50), kale and chourico in potato broth. So I tried the sopa do Mar ($3.50), which was billed as seafood bisque with shrimp, scallops, and crabmeat. Well, there were pieces of maybe one shrimp, no detectable scallops, and the crab was surimi, which is crab-flavored pollock.

Seafood is the mainstay, as you'd expect from a restaurant named Star of the Sea. The dozen choices include grilled squid -- though not the grilled octopus of the old place, and two variations on bacalhau, the reconstituted dried cod that is popular from Lisbon to Sicily. Johnnie chose the signature version, bacalhau a Estrela do Mar ($13.95), instead of having it grilled.

Topped with a mayonnaisace sauce that included caramelized onions, the pan-fried fish was delicious in a flavorful broth. (Vasco da Gama brought curry spices back from the Orient, so Portuguese cookery can taste mysteriously exotic.) Fulfilling my responsibility as resident carnivore, I had a dish I'd always wanted to try: bifa a Portuguesa ($12.95). A fried egg, ham, and some strips of red bell pepper came atop a sirloin steak. Apart from the sense that I was at breakfast, the combination was fine. Both our dishes came with traditional potato fries, which are like moist, thick potato chips.

For dessert, I had the chocolate mousse ($3), which was OK, but nothing like the kitchen-made flan ($3.50) wisely chosen by my counterpart. It was eggy and downright voluptuous, swimming in its pool of caramelized sugar. All this and fado singing on weekends in the fall. Even if Johnnie had let me have more of her flan, I knew I'd be back.

Bill Rodriguez can be reached at billrod@reporters.net.

Issue Date: July 19 - 25, 2002